Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Fighter Planes (Asia vs West)

This post is not about war between West and Asia : )
It is related to the technical aspect comparison between Asia and West in the Fighter Planes production. Yeah it may seem that there is very little comparison and West will easily win this aspect but the point is for how long?

Europe may call China a "Duplicator" and India an "Importer" of their technology. It was true if you take it back 7-8 years but the trend is changing and it is changing fast. China surprised western world with their Fifth Generation Stealth Fighter prototype J-20 ''Eagle" they call it. It was not expected before 2020 according to U.S think tanks. Many analyst said that this fighter may be based on the technology of F-117 Night Hawk operated by U.S since 1983. They believe that China has reverse engineered F-117 technology when one of them was shot down by Serbian military during Kosovo War 1999. Every U.S fighter aircraft is built with a kill switch. Besides why would Fifth Generation will be based on something as old ?( Chinese Intelligence: We have found a shot down F-117 Night Hawk. The Serbians are asking a lot of money but we can manage because we have trillion of dollars in reserve. It will help us in building our 1983 fifth generation fighter and if it does not we will still be having trillion of dollars in our reserves.)

Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), a Chinese state-owned company is partnering up with US Aerospace to prepare bids for two US military contracts, including one to replace the aging presidential helicopter fleet Marine One. This is change and this time from Chinese side.
Around the time, when there was an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico Obama administration sent a letter to the House of representative about allowing the sales of C-130 Herculesto China to be used for oil spill response operations at Yellow sea. This was surprising because of three reasons:

US will lift a strict embargo on arms sales to China for a C-130

China has a fleet of Y-8s, copy of Antonov An-12 and Y-9 is in developing stages which is called in western media as an imitation of C-130J, the newest version of C-130 Hercules family. This fact must be cleared that Y-9 has nothing to do with C-130s and it is a stretched version of Y-8 with greater payload and range.

China did not even ask request for information (RFI) thus showing no intention for written information about the capabilities of the C-130.

For imitating first you need to have a close look at the THING. It is not happeningin this case.